Eszter Morvay from IDC on tablets-n-targets

How can one woman from a small city in the north of Hungary make CEOs and Vice Presidents across Europe, Middle East and Africa break out in a cold sweat? Simples. You give her years of experience, razor sharp wit and a BS detector tuned to the max. Then you put her in charge of the most important market research report in the region, the IDC EMEA PC Tracker. KitGuru dons body armour and prepares to meet Eszter Morvay. Wish us luck.

Seems that not a day goes past without the KitGuru Labs taking delivery of another spectacular piece of kit. Whether it be a +£600 dual-GPU graphics card, full-blown gaming laptop or even a simple 8GB set of 2000MHz low latency memory. We spend a lot of time filtering the crap, so you don’t have to. KitGuru’s Lab spends its time on generating intelligent buying advice on products that we know you will be considering. Decent kit – that’s the whole of the market, right?

At KitGuru we know what we like and we like what we know

When speaking with Eszter Morvay, IDC’s Research Manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, it quickly becomes clear that the mass market is not talking about buying 2nd generation Intel Core i7 2600k processors. Oh no.

While leading technology sites like KitGuru spend a lot of time focusing on the high end and peak-performance products, the mass market is in a very different price space.

The difference in spend is significant. For example, if a KitGuru reader spent around £999 ($1,500) on a new PC build, we wouldn’t think it was extravagant. In fact, we’d probably think you’d made some compromises.

But, in the mass market, that £999 price point is £400 over one of the biggest sweet spots. Morvay tells us that if you look back over the past 12 months and tally how many systems were sold at £599 or less (desktop, laptop and netbook), then you’d probably find it was around 83%.

We’ll say that again. In 2010, for the UK market, only 17% of the systems sold were in the sub$1k/£600 market. [KitGuru readers should feel a sense of superiority at this point, because our research shows that you invest in much faster kit – Ed].